By autumn Kiko’s obvious his-story to her-story to embellish the truth was diagnostic Doctor Who the show, the Count of Monte Cristo the book, and the Federalist Papers of Hamilton the Broadway playbill. To me frustration was fixation jettisoned by her amnesia. She had a knack. Meaning me, meaning Maggie our ginger cat who had climbed the hot tin roof famously. I could
not just look away. Always a rolling scuttle historian and a Queen’s gambit chaturanga female warrior combined, she could be a trooper but not this trooped. I was the progressive obsessive.

That year I had my head in the veined webs of a sago sky celebrating a clutter of wobbles while digesting some hefty old fashioned standard history, the Indian way. Well, you know as custom would demand, that meant colorfully, that meant intricately, that meant with enterprising disregard to the direction Kiko was heading, but not too heady. My kitchen being one of a kind, meaning impractical, in some versions what one would call a rustic tribal kitchen that works, was getting restorative new juices. And I was running three jobs to keep the repair relays flowing.

The pounding at the door streaming from my microwave when in overuse was an amateurish percussion device motioning me to listen harder in an irregular kind of way. Could be my ‘Hills Are Alive’ whistling rickshaw-wallah here to deliver my clay pot full of jelly pudding mishti doi shrikhand on the side, ‘Covenant of–’ some unusual backwaters for my main course which I was halfway perusing. My oversized flip-flop sandals engineered me forward before Kiko like a misaligned missile whizzed past in agony. Useful tool I said to my book with the strong binding. Soaked up in sudden downpour she looked as stringy and bedraggled as our after ginger Maggie. Cat! Cat! she implored piteously, a refreshing Holly GoLightly to our mendacious Maggie.

I think the ferocity from the cyclones that year, real and book-marked, flipped us both over. Sheathed in wetness, unwary of the sodden earth around her, the wettest creature on the planet could not stop crying, if you don’t count the cat. I believe Kiko and I relived several lachrymose victories in similar yet dissimilar application that afternoon of the big platitudes in all its broken supplications, our witless, asinine fertility of imagination luxuriating in makeshift mendacity. Mend-a-city!

To extricate herself from the past required primrose prim pinkyness. To extricate me bulldozed orchestration. Days we drank rainwater while recovering from the torpor of noonday heat. She, disappearing in a sulphurous burn, to repair. I, pondering the miracles of fame and falsehood that come with his-story and the quest. The transparency of grand things readily stamped story-book adventures of worthies to the ranks of the fabled. Undeniable mendacity. Some tools simply did not exist to exalt certain worthies to the same aggrandizement as others, no matter what their family history. Sweetened, ours did.

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Rekha Valliappan is an internationally published poet and writer. She grew up between languages and places from India to USA through Malaysia. She has been nominated for multiple awards such as the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She won the Accent Prize for Speculative Short Story, was shortlisted in winners circle by Ouen Press, voted Poem of the Week in Red Fez, recognized as Best of Fiction and Best Short Stories by Across The Margin and Schlock! Science Fiction Webzine, and has short stories and poems published in journals and anthologies such as Litro Magazine, Spillwords, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere.